Audit: State badly botched paper tax returns last year

1:46 PM,
Apr. 9, 2014

New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli

Written by

Joseph Spector
Journal Albany Bureau

ALBANY The state Department of Taxation and Finance incurred more than $6 million in overtime costs last year when it had massive delays in processing tax returns filed on paper, an audit Wednesday found.

The tax department was heavily criticized last year when it struggled to meet the demand of paper tax returns after it hired a third-party vendor to handle the work. The process became so bad that the audit by Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli's office found that 90 percent of returns were late and 22 percent had serious errors, such as messing up filers' Social Security numbers.